Indo-European Poetry and Myth

DEATH

One’s fated death, by definition, cannot be postponed or (one would sup-
pose) advanced. But an idiom attested in Greek, Latin, Old Persian, Pali,
Baluchi, Ossetic, Lithuanian, and several Slavonic languages, and so presum-
ably current at least in the east and central Indo-European territories, suggests
a distinction between the death that belongs to one as one’s birthright, so to
speak, and a premature death caused by violence, drowning, or some other
manifest external agency. Someone who avoided the latter type and died
naturally was said to ‘die by his own death’.^33 The implied antithesis is an
alien death. Are both types alike ordained by the Fates? If so, what is the status
of the ‘own death’ that the murder victim is cheated of? I do not imagine the
question was ever considered; but it points up a discrepancy between rival
concepts.

Death as sleep; death as a journey

From one point of view death is a kind of sleep. ‘Sleep’, ‘the eternal sleep’, ‘the
sleep of death’, etc., is widely used as a poetic metaphor or euphemism for
death. In the Rigveda the causative stem (ní)sva ̄paya-‘put to sleep’ is four
times used of putting to death (1. 121. 11; 4. 30. 21; 7. 19. 4; 9. 97. 54);
cf. MBh. 8. 31. 46 svapsyanti, ‘they will sleep’. A slain warrior in the Iliad
κοιμσατο χα ́ λκεον πνον, ‘fell into the bronze sleep’ (11. 241); another
simplyεδει, ‘sleeps’ (14. 482). For Lucretius the dead man is leto sopitus
(3. 904, cf. 920 f., 466, Catull. 5. 6, etc.). So sofa‘sleep’ is used in Norse
(Sigrdrífumál 34. 6), and in Old English swefan (Waldere A 31, Beowulf 2060,
2256, 2457, 2746); similarly we findof slæ ̄ ̄ p e þ æ ̄ ̄m fæstan‘out of that fast sleep’
(Andreas 795); deaðes swefn‘the sleep of death’ (Genesis B 720). In the Latvian
songs death is often pictured as a sleep.^34 In the Armenian oral epic David
rides to the tent of his enemy Melik and finds him sleeping. He tells the
guards to wake him, but they say he is in the middle of a seven-day sleep and
cannot be disturbed for four more days. David says ‘I am not concerned with
his sleep –– call him quickly... I will put him to a lasting sleep’ (Sassountsy
David 273). Unsurprisingly, the image is not distinctively Indo-European. It

(^33) Schulze (1966), 131–46 and 159 f.; R. C. T. Parker, ZPE 139 (2002), 66–8; M. L. West, ZPE
143 (2003), 70.
(^34) LD 27414, 27520, 27528, 27531, 27638, 27707 = Jonval nos. 1214, 1207, 1213, 1164, 1160,
1201.

10. Mortality and Fame 387